It's a Quick Read Two-Two

Orange County Register: The Catch restaurant and sports bar that had been in the shadow of Angel Stadium for 32 years before closing in February 2008 will reopen even closer to the Big A. . . . While noting highway deaths dropped nearly 10 percent locally and nationwide, the Reg unveils a map showing Orange County's deadliest spots on highway and surface-streets. . . . An ex-El Modena High School band student tried to blackmail a band teacher with sex allegations, charges the DA. Silly Miguel Lopez: everyone knows bandos don't get any. . . . The headline tells it all: "Man Hurt When He Jumps From Stolen Van." Would he have not have been injured if the van belonged to him? Tell me now! . . . Norman: OC business pessimism triples.

Los Angeles Times: U.S. home prices fall a record 19 percent. . . . Shane Pennington, a 19-year-old from North Carolina who had been living and working in OC, is found stabbed to death on a Tijuana beach. . . . Kaiser Permanente fired 15 hospital employees who snooped into Octo-Mom's medical records. . . . Shaikin: For the first time since 1992, none of the Angels' starting outfielders will be home-grown players, all having been imported from other teams.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.